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Best Storage Products of 2007

New companies and their products garner most of this year's awards. If there's a lesson to be learned from the 2007 Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com Products of the Year, it's that vendors can't rest on their laurels. New guys on the block pop up every day with fresh ideas and technologies, and better ways of doing things. Only a few vendors from last year's winners' list are back, and none of the 2006 gold medal winners showed up this year. You'll have to keep reading to find the winners, but here are a few companies that failed to make the 2007 list: Brocade Communications Systems Inc., EMC Corp., Emulex Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., QLogic Corp. and Symantec Corp. Who does that leave? Three startups won in one category, and two startups won in two other product groups. Three of the winners are companies that launched their first products in 2007. Award winners include two virtualization software products--no, not VMware--a storage grid system, a self-encrypting hard drive and a disaster ...

Features
in this issue

Our sixth annual Products of the Year awards recognize the 15 new or enhanced storage products that rose to the top in 2007. The editors of Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com, along with a panel of users and industry experts, selected these winning products based on their innovation and performance, among other factors.

As storage becomes more complex and costly, businesses are seeking storage professionals who can architect various tiers of networked storage, document what they've done, and help their business units select the type of storage that best supports their applications' requirements at a price that makes the executive suite smile.

Virtual machines (VMs) can be a boon to businesses because they allow consolidation, but they can be a burden when IT considers the complexities of backing them up, and managing and tracking them. It will behoove storage administrators to learn the best ways to protect VMs in their environment and, with management and monitoring tools, control their growth.

Columns
in this issue

Backup success rates are improving, but reliable data recovery can still be a nightmare. The good news is that backup reporting tools can give you more insight than ever into the sometimes mysterious process of data protection.

Tighter budgets could mean some belt-tightening in your storage shop. To save money, you might have to spend a little to take advantage of some of the key trends for 2008: virtualization, green storage and storage as a service.